THE COW SCENE and other (wild) beasts

"She's so Jersey."

                                                                                                                                                                        New Yorker magazine, 7/29/13

 

This is dairy country.  Which is not to say that there aren’t farms here with llamas, alpacas, horses––miniature, Icelandic, Morgan, and other––donkeys, sheep, and, notably, one Bactrian camel.  Farmers nearby often have a couple of beef cows (steers, in other words) most of which look really huge.  But this is mostly about cows, and calves at that.  Even a two-year-old calf is nearly the size of a fully-grown cow.  You don’t realize just how big is big until you stand really close to an adult cow.  Or see one lying down, those big stomachs and udders kind of flattening out and occupying what seems like yards of space.

Two dairy cows, in repose

Ben, Audrey and Carly, ages 10, 12 and 14, respectively, are committed to 4-H this summer, which for them means working with calves in preparation for showing them at the annual Addison County Field Days that starts this year on Tuesday, August 6.  The cows and kids are matched up roughly by size:  an older and taller person like Carly will have an older and bigger calf.  Carly’s calf, named Autumn, is about one year old.  Audrey’s, named Belle, and Ben’s, called Kinsey, are each about nine months old.  All the calves are either Holsteins (the black and white ones) or Jerseys (light brown).  From the time the 4-H’ers are assigned their calves until the end of Field Days they are responsible for cleaning their cow’s stable, keeping the calf clean, fastening its halters, taking the calf on a lead, and exhibiting in the judging ring.  (More on that later.)  This is not as easy as you might think.

Carly with Autumn

Audrey bonding with Belle

In the days before Field Days Carly, Ben and Audrey and the other 4-H’ers made regular trips to the barn where the 4-H cows were boarding, a farm nearby that has good stable facilities but has no cattle of its own.  There they had to wash their calf, take it out of the barn on a lead, and practice what they will be doing in the show ring:  parading their calves, and lining them up correctly for the judges.  The first judging at the fair is about conformation:  it is the cow that will be judged (although there is doubtless some contribution made by the manner in which the calf is being led and presented).  The ideal calf, future cow, needs to have certain ideal characteristics.  To even begin to understand the lingo in judging, it’s necessary to picture the parts of a cow:

Dairy judges have five categories of ideal traits:*  “frame,” “dairy character” (yes, character), “body capacity,” “feet and legs,” and “udder.”  What’s important in a cow’s frame is that it have a long and wide rump with pin bones (you can see why I put in the chart) that are lower than hip bones, thurls (see above) wide apart, proper proportion of height at withers and hips, front legs placed straight and square, full crops and straight and strong back.  And (I love this) the “head should be feminine…”   (Maybe it’s those long eyelashes.)  As for dairy character, this is about finding evidence of a good future milk supply by looking at the ribs (wide apart), withers (sharp), neck (long, lean), skin (loose, pliable). Then there’s body capacity volumetrically speaking (deep and wide is good).  Feet and legs should show good mobility (well-rounded closed toes, straight rear legs wide apart, short and strong pasterns).  Lastly, but likely most important, there’s the udder.  That, after all, is what it’s all about. Udder traits are depth, teat placement, strong support of the udder cleft, fore and aft udders wide, high and firmly attached (one would hope!), cylindrical teats of uniform size––in short, a balanced and nice looking udder that looks like it would happily hold a lot of milk. 

In a calf many of these same characteristics will be in a premature state.  Not much of an udder, for example, but lots of potential.   

4-H'ers getting show ring advice

The second judging is all about the 4-H’er him/herself.  (Calf-showing 4-H’ers are both boys and girls, more or less equally.)  “Showmanship” is the byword.  This means that the manner, attitude, and care with which they present their animal will be looked at closely.  To prep for this all the 4-H’ers have been bonding with their calves for many weeks.  At each visit to the barn the young trainers will have led their calves out of the barn, gripping the halters tightly as the calves clump along.  Watching eight or nine calves being led in a slow wobbly circle on a pleasant summer afternoon for an hour or so is as soothing an activity as meditation.  Things get a bit exciting when one of the larger calves slips her harness and scoots off into the pasture.  She kicks up her heels, stops to browse for a moment, then remembers she is free and cantors off again, eluding capture until the lure of grain overwhelms freedom.

The calves are slowly led around in a circle by their 4-H'ers

Real dairy life isn’t something I want to know a lot about.  It has some unpleasant, even ugly, aspects.  Think about eggs, for instance. Where are all the male chickens?  Who needs roosters when all you want is eggs?  You can think about it, but honestly, I don’t really want to.   I also don’t like thinking about what happens to all the male calves.  It’s not very different from the chicken issue.       

Male calves are obviously pretty useless to a dairy operation.  Bulls are harder to handle than cows and how many do you need, really, for reproduction.  Some farms don’t need bulls at all.  Given that the odds of a cow giving birth to a male is around 50 per cent (barring fooling around with the semen), there are going to be extra male calves.  Some of them may be castrated and kept for beef (consider them lucky) and some others sold for veal, a side product of dairy farming I’d never thought about before.  The topic of male calves often occasions a rueful expression. It’s not a happy thought. 

At the calf barn there is a very young male calf who is adored by everyone, and who is having what will probably be the very best time of his life, the presence of 4-H’ers a bonus for this little guy who looks beguilingly like a fawn.  Everyone vies to feed him his bottle, to pet him, and take him out of his stall on a lead and watch him scamper about.  (You could imagine having him as a pet.)  His mother, Luna, is in an adjacent stall.  Another lucky one, she is hand-milked daily. Her milk–unhomogenized, unpasteurized raw milk–fills a refrigerator and is for sale.  It tastes delicious.  I have watched Ben and Audrey pour the cream from the top of the milk into a smaller jar and shake the jar for maybe ten minutes to make butter.  The remaining liquid in which the new butter floats is buttermilk.

The little male calf romping

Everyone vies to feed the little calf

Usually calves are separated from their mothers a couple of days after birth.  The cow’s milk, of course, is intended for human, not calves.  (Calves will then drink a milk replacement.)  Of course the whole business of milk production means cows need to be lactating, and naturally they lactate as a result of giving birth to a calf.  Calf production is a constant component of milk production.   Pregnancy is nine months, like humans.  Milk levels peak at around 40 to 60 days after calving.**  As a result the life of a cow is a cycle of pregnancy, birthing, lactation, repeated several times over. 

 

Only yards away from the cow, a refrigerator full of raw milk

And what of those other (wild) beasts?  

Picture two birds, then four, battling in mid-air.  Picture one knocking another away from its source of food.  Imagine four of them aggressively tearing up and down and sideways.  Picture one sitting atop its food source to claim the territory as its own and no one else’s.  Know that these are beautiful, tiny hummingbirds.  Each day they––however many there are––consume more than two full feeders of nectar.

The feeder was emptied twice in a single day.

Below our kitchen windows we have been hearing a loud angry buzzing nearly every day, so loud I imagine the insect making it much be about three feet wide.  Last week when Ken squeezed behind the shrub below the kitchen window to clean it he was suddenly set upon by hornets, fortunately escaping with only two bites.  A few days later I peered behind the shrub and found a huge hornet nest.  He was lucky.  The hornets were not.  The way to get rid of a nest like that is to wait until dark when all the hornets are back from foraging and spray into the nest opening.  Vale, hornet!

Hidden behind the shrub...

...was this surprise.

We have often been dive-bombed by swallows, the latest species to make a nest under the roof of our porch.  This one was a minor feat of mud and twig engineering, as the next rests on nothing in particular, a mere half-inch of board. The rest is cantilevered.  Directly below the nest on the porch deck I found broken eggs on two separate occasions.  I was surprised to find two baby swallows looking down at me from the nest above.  Did these two toss out their two siblings?  I wonder.  Yesterday, again directly below the nest, I found the body of a very tiny mouse lying amid bird droppings.  Swallows eat flying insects.  Could the mouse, being utterly the wrong species, possibly have been an item of rejected food?  Or was it a victim of a bird poop bomb?

The mother swallows looks down at us.  Who tossed out the eggs?

Mysteries.

*Jessica Stamschror, Dr. Tony Seykora, and Dr. Les Hansen, Department of Animal Science, University of Minnesota College of Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Science, “Judging Dairy Cattle, July 2000.

**Mike Hutjens, "Managing the Transition Cow," University of Illinois Extension, via Wikipedia

LETS HEAR IT FOR JUNE!

Our meadow, uncut, has abundant wildflowers

“And what is so rare as a day in June?”

James Russell Lowell

“June is bustin' out all over!

All over the meadow and the hill!

Buds're bustin' outa bushes

And the rompin' river pushes

Ev'ry little wheel that wheels beside the mill!”

Rodgers and Hammerstein, “Carousel”

                                June, moon, spoon, tune, etc.

Long after I stopped thinking about June solely as the month that school ends, it was just the time before the summer heat got serious, the time the garden still looked good before weeds and insects took over, when water everywhere–ocean, lakes, pools–was still a bit cold for swimming, and of course it was the official beginning of bug season.  That was about it.  Not my favorite month, if I thought about it at all.  Some years we even kind of threw the month away, picking June as a good time to be elsewhere, far away from home, out of the country even, to get ahead of the tourist season, because what was so compelling about being at home in June?

 But now…well, there’s so much more going on.


DUCK TIME

This morning Ken woke me up to let me know he spotted the ducks and ducklings I’d been on the lookout for in the pond.  I got out of bed and grabbed the binoculars and my camera.  There they were:  five ducklings and two females.  At first the ducklings were snuggled together in a fuzzy mass in the tall grass at the water’s edge while the two females preened and dunked in the middle of the pond.  One adult female was a mallard, the other a merganser.  A bit later all the ducks were together, swimming.  But whose ducklings were they?  When I checked my photo later the camera made it clear the ducklings were mallards and hence belonged to the mallard female.  What, then, was the merganser doing there?

An illustration of a Hooded Merganser male

It was about a month ago that we first saw a mating pair of hooded mergansers (the male is wildly colorful with a shovel-shaped head and easily identifiable, the female considerably plainer) in our pond.  They came and went over a period of days.  We had also seen a mating pair of mallards at an earlier time.  But because the female merganser reappeared several times recently, once floating next to what looked like five ducklings, we naturally assumed the ducklings were hers.  After I saw the group for the first time, I assumed they–mergansers–had nested somewhere nearby.  I peered beneath the branches that sweep over the water on the more secluded end of the pond that I figured might serve a refuge for a nest.  No sign of any nest.  It wasn't until later that I learned hooded mergansers nest in tall tree cavities, of all places, the ducklings often beginning their post-nest life with a 20 or 30 foot fall to the ground.  What’s more, these tree nests may be as far as a half mile or so from the nearest water.

The ducklings are just a fuzzy mass at the edge of the pond

 I was sure I saw the merganser swimming with the ducklings (the same ducklings?) just a day ago.  Are the two ducks sharing maternal duties?   Or do they both have ducklings?  If the female merganser had ducklings, did she lose them?  I wish we knew.  After an hour or so of messing around on the pond they sailed under our bridge and did not reappear that day.  (That is to say, not while we were looking.)  The grasses are thick at that end, but flowing water peters out and becomes only a seep. Where did they go?  Into the reeds?  Into the meadow?  Or did they swim back later, unnoticed, toward the forest?  Yesterday the female mallard seemed to be in sole charge, and we watched as she moved across the corner of the lawn encircled by ducklings, and then they all disappeared into the tall grass.  Where was the merganser?

The mallard female with her brood of five

We could try and learn the answers to all these questions, but the minor events of daily life intervene.  I think about how someone like nature writer Berndt Heinrich (noted for his study of ravens, among other birds) sat for hours, days, weeks, notebook in hand, observing and waiting, waiting and observing.  If we did that to even a small extent, we would know the answers to some of these simple questions.   But there are many other happenings to see, and besides, it’s usually time for breakfast.



BIRD TIME

We have had a bird feeder behind the house near our windows (well, about ten feet to 15 feet away; we move it around) all year, and it’s always attracted masses of birds.  But this spring things have gotten crazy.  The gentle nuthatches, goldfinches, titmice, have given way to a more confident larger birds:  red-winged blackbirds, grackles, pileated woodpeckers, bluejays, and red-crested grosbeaks.  Some species (blackbirds, for instance) can be aggressive, but we have noticed that others, like grosbeaks, are not intimidated.  We are particularly fond of the grosbeaks, maybe because there is a grosbeak nest with three babies above the porch doorway.

Three baby grosbeaks in a nicely decorated nest

This eager robin made her nest in the solar panel while the electrician was
still at work; hanging from the nest are shreds of an old tarp

Sometimes bird activity becomes frenzied.  Birds fly at the windows, and lately a woodpecker (why only a woodpecker, I’ve no idea) has taken to landing right on the window screen and staying there, looking inside before flying off again.  After several birds hit our windows during the year on the feeder side of the house (body count:  only one, remarkably) we decided to keep the screens up year-round.  Earlier this week some large bird slammed into the screen, enough to do some real damage to the mesh, apparently not to the bird (no body located).  We’ve invited more species:  two newly placed hummingbird feeders on the front porch need refilling nearly every other day. Each is hit by a single hummingbird at a time, probably a territorial thing, one choosing the feeder on the left, the other on the right.  There are many avian territorial battles going on around us, but what we see of it is only a suggestion of the actual skirmishes and rivalries playing out.

Our shredded screen; the hole is about 5 inches long

FLOWER TIME  (GRASSES, TOO)


Our grassy meadow is growing tall.  So too are the wildflowers:  purple vetch, clover, buttercups and more.  Last year our field was not hayed until late July.  As long as it’s cut at least once in the summer this is fine with us, as it allows meadow-nesting species time to fledge.  In fact, to protect the threatened ground-nesting bobolink, an environmental project here in Vermont is offering farmers a subsidy if they withhold haying until the bobolinks (ground-nesting and endangered) have safely left the nest.  Early hay provides the most nutritious feed, so refraining until July incurs an actual monetary loss to the farmer.

Without a mowed path, the going would be tough

It was a rainy and mostly cool month.  Still is, actually, although June is nearly over.  Rain set local haying operations back after an optimistic start in gorgeous dry weather.  The first cuttings of hay began early in the month but then delays set in because of rain.   What applies to grass is also true of corn, in a way, as corn is also a grass, albeit an annual one.  A column in our local paper describes the situation this way:  “In June the young plants are still becoming established.  A wet spring…can result in a shallow root system (especially in our Addison County clay soils) so if things dry up later the roots won’t be able to reach the moisture.  Corn requires hot, humid days and warm nights for rapid growth…”   This is dairy country, and cows generally are fed half grain and the rest corn and grass silage, silage being the rest of the corn plant minus the corn.  An acre of corn, by the way, will feed a herd of 100 milking cows for about 12 days.*  

The showiest flowers bloom in the month of June.  There can’t be enough peonies!  If only their blooms lasted longer.  Peonies I planted two years ago have taken until now to become abundant bloomers.  Understanding more about peonies now (my previous lack of knowledge the result of not being able to grow plants that love sun, like peonies), I have learned that these lush flowers have no odor, or no pleasant odor.  Most peonies–those gorgeous colors, the subtle variations–are hybrids.  The price paid for hybridization is the failure of fragrance.  I read somewhere that no-fragrance roses have been created, too.  This seems a high a price to pay for appearance.



REPTILE TIME

The frogs are trilling (tree frogs) and gulping (bullfrogs) again.  They are especially loud on warm humid nights, of which we have had several as June yields to July.  What we have noticed more this season than last is the number of snakes, notably all harmless.  Female garter snakes like to bask in the sun to optimize the temperature for their developing offspring so it’s no surprise to find them in the garden, near the patio’s stone wall, and numerous places near the house on sunny days.  They will give birth until July and early August.**  Only once so far have we seen a milk snake, a bit less benign looking, but harmless nonetheless.  Both milk and garter snakes are common around here, frequenting garden, stone walls, barnyards.  The only poisonous snake in the state of Vermont where there are eleven snake species in all, is the Eastern Timber Rattlesnake, considered endangered and found in only a few areas of western Rutland County, just south of our county.  Of the eleven, the Eastern Ribbonsnake, Eastern Ratsnake, North American Racer are rare (read: threatened) and the Smooth Greensnake, and Ring-Necked Snake are at “moderate risk” due to restricted range or recent decline.  The chief enemy of snakes–big surprise–is man.

A basking milk snake

Snapping turtles are abundant, however.  Last year we spotted one, a big one, in the middle of the road between here and Middlebury.  Ken stopped the car to move the turtle from the road.  It was so heavy he just managed to lift the thing, holding it carefully away from his body with his hands kind of amid ships so to speak, to keep them away from its snapping angry mouth at the end of a surprisingly long neck.  He managed to carry it to the side of the road and returned to the car.  But Ken, I said, you have the turtle facing the wrong way.  It was about to start heading across the road again.  Ken had to pick the huge creature up one more time and face it in the right direction, into which it finally started to move.

Having left our pond, this  snapping turtle is crawling off toward the forest

I always assumed there could be one of these creatures in our pond.  In the summer it’s too muddy to see the bottom so we could never know for sure.  Our first summer here Ben and Audrey, then 8 and 10 respectively, liked to swim in the pond, mud or no.  (Neither Ken nor I have; too muddy, thank you, but I will happily swim in clear water.)  But now we do know for sure:  a substantial snapping turtle with maybe a 14-inch-long shell, wet and covered with mud, was discovered crawling across the driveway recently just above the pond.  It was most likely on its way to lay its eggs.


AND FIREFLY TIME!

Everyone loves fireflies.  They are actually a kind of beetle, of the family Lampyridae, although as beetles go, they are kind of cute.  There are 19 species of fireflies in Vermont.  (Who knew!)  And how lovely for us humans that they use bioluminescence to attract sexual partners, males signalling to females who wait in the grass and may answer with a blink or two.  The higher the temperature, the faster they blink.

And this, from a 2002 story on Vermont Public Radio, the voice of University of Florida entomologist Jim Lloyd:  “There are subtle differences in the color of the light emitted by different varieties of lightning bugs: from a waxy yellow or lime green to a coppery glow. The males of each species have their own unique semaphore: a Morse code of dots and dashes. Most fireflies look pretty much the same, so identifying these patterns is the surest way to pinpoint a particular species. But it's not easy. It takes a keen eye, a stopwatch to time the intervals between flashes, and a thermometer. A firefly in Vermont might flash a little differently from one of the same species in Massachusetts. …these kinds of regional firefly dialects have developed because populations of fireflies are often isolated by mountains and forests. Fireflies may seem defenseless, but some are poisonous, especially for small reptiles or amphibians looking for a meal.”

Ah, June.

*Information thanks to Joe Klopfenstein, DVM, Column, Addison Independent, June 20, 2013

**Information from “The Place You Call Home,” a Northern Woodlands Publication, Center for Northern Woodlands Education, 2008.

HERE COMES THE SUN

Here comes the sun

Here comes the sun, and I say

It's all right

It's all right

–––The Beatles

Solar! The black clip on the sharp left corner is to keep humans–or cows–from head injuries

Did I mention how much sun shines on our land?  Before we lived here I don’t think I was ever so aware of sunlight unless I was at the beach.  I open the front door at, say 2 in the afternoon on a bright June day, and wham!  I’ve got to reach for my sunglasses just to see.  (Remember the Seinfeld episode when Kramer’s apartment was blasted by the hellish beam of the neon sign from the chicken restaurant?*  It’s like that. Almost.)  We face directly west, our back to the east where the slopes rise to Buck Mountain, delaying our morning light noticeably in the winter but not a whit this time of year, woods on the north side, and nothing whatever to impede the sun from the south.  Energy, wild, unharnessed. 

Well, now it’s harnessed, at least modestly. 

In Vermont, in our field, a big dig begins; making holes for the sona tubes that will hold solar panels

I guess we were solar-ready in a way.   In Masssachusetts, where we lived until 2010, there was a fleeting period of energy-consciousness in the early 1980’s––most likely emanating from the time of the Carter administration and latent memories of the gas crisis of the 1970’s––when sizeable rebates were available to anyone who installed solar panels.  We had two panels to heat water placed on the roof of the more-or-less south-facing garage of our house in Lexington.  (We’re talking about solar water heating.  Photovoltaics were out of the question; they were too expensive and far less efficient than they are today.)  On brilliant sunny days I liked thinking that the water we showered in was heated by the sun.  But we never got a clear picture of the energy we saved.  The temperature dial on the solar tank fizzled after a couple of years.  We tended to forget what the reading were supposed to mean anyway.  Only a slight gurgling noise from the tank suggested our water was actually getting sun-warmed.  Over time the trees around the back yard grew larger, and before long the panels were in a veritable hole of sunshine.  When the possibility of replacing the solar water tank loomed for the second time, we had the panels removed. 

Our first solar romance was over.

Some pretty much VT-type sentiments
(car of one of our solar installers)

There were never very many solar installations in Lexington.  A handful, maybe.  A few I’d noticed in the 1980’s and 90’s had, like ours, tended to disappear by 2000.  But then I never thought to see much in the way of solar panels on homes in any state in the Northeast. (Boston averages about 200 days of sunshine per year.  That sounds optimistic, but it’s a fact.  Really.)  In 2008 we happened to be driving around Las Vegas, a city with nearly 300 days of sunshine a year (292, counting partial), and got lost in a suburban landscape of endless spanking new housing communities, raw and still mostly unoccupied.  (A condition in which they would remain, given the recession just around the corner.)  Not a single roof bore solar panels.  Not one.  I’m sure there must have been housing elsewhere with solar panels that we happened not to see, but you would expect solar to be a no-brainer anywhere in the state of Nevada.  The thing is, there are few incentives for homeowners in that state.   According to a site tracking solar progress in Nevada http://solarpowerrocks.com/nevada/ incentives are "geared toward industrial size installations for businesses or power companies with eyes on creating horizons of silicon in the desert."

  

A small Nevada town whose name I forgot, where the sun shines without hitting a  panel

Here in Vermont we have half that average number of days with sunshine (a mere 159, counting partial), yet we live five miles from a solar array, and other solar is not terribly hard to find.  There is a move to get more homeowners onto solar, concentrating for the moment on our county.

Suncommon is the Vermont agent for SunPower 

During the winter we read in our local paper about a new concept to encourage people in this area to go solar.  Leasing.  Sure, if you want to spend some $20,000 or so you can buy a solar system and never pay another penny for electricity.  On the face of it, if your electrical costs were, say, $1,500 a year, you would break even in well under twenty years.  If you lease, you don’t own the system, and you continue to pay your $l,500 or so for electricity.  Still, why bother?

The sona tube goes down about 6 feet and will be filled with concrete.
This is necessary as the panels will be like sails in the wind.

The trench from panel 3 brings the power to the electrical panel in the basement.
(Where did all those rocks come from? All the soil is pure clay.)

One reason, of course is that it feels like the right thing to do.  We are helping in a small way to save energy.  But that’s not really enough.  There is a sweetener.  Whether you own or lease, if your system produces more kilowatt hours than you use, our electric company, Green Mountain Power, will buy back the electricity at a “guaranteed fixed rate” of $0.20 per kilowatt hour, $0.21 by year four.  (Our most recent bill from Green Mountain Power charged us only $0.147 per kilowatt hour.)   The three panels installed in our sunny meadow are set to produce a “guaranteed range of annual production” of 14,704 to 16,252 kilowatt hours in year one.  Our actual electricity usage in 2012 was 9,388 kilowatt hours, in 2011 roughly the same.  Assuming we continue to use power at the same pace, we should be able to claim a rebate from Green Mountain Power for the difference between 9,000-plus kilowatt hours and somewhere between 14,000 and 16,000 kilowatt hours.  Because our system was more expensive to install than a roof system (our roof faces east-west), and we have three panels rather than the two that may have sufficed to cover our current electrical needs, we will have a higher monthly electrical bill (aka lease payment) before figuring in rebates for over-generation of power.   Will we come out ahead, or behind?

The panels are fitted into the frames

The inner workings on post #3

Electrical connections are made

A robin has already laid two eggs in a niche on post #3

After twenty years the kilowatt hours our system will produce is projected to decrease to a range of 14,021 to 15,497.  All solar panels lose power over time, but we noted that manufacturing defects in the industry have recently come to light.  According to a May 28, 2013 New York Times article:

“The solar panels covering a vast warehouse roof in the sun-soaked Inland Empire region east of Los Angeles were only two years into their expected 25-year life span when they began to fail.  Coatings that protect the panels disintegrated while other defects caused two fires that took the system offline for two years, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenues.  It was not an isolated incident. Worldwide, testing labs, developers, financiers and insurers are reporting similar problems and say the $77 billion solar industry is facing a quality crisis just as solar panels are on the verge of widespread adoption.”

Most of the problems, according to the Times, were with panels made in China, the largest manufacturer of solar panels, but some American-made panels were defective as well.  Our panels (we asked) are among those manufactured in the US.   One of the installers commented they were "really good" panels.  In any case, we don’t own them.

The solar array, and visitor information, above, at the edge of Vergennes center

Our system is not officially operational; it awaits an exchange of paperwork and stamps of approval that signify we have a functioning system.  Suncommon, the company that makes presentations about solar power and installed our system, serves as the Vermont agent for SunPower, the company based in California that actually owns our panels.  We have no responsibility for upkeep (if there is any) or anything else for that matter.  (Except that it falls upon us to ask the power company for the rebate.)   A computer site will monitor the energy our system is producing.  So far the system was “on” only for limited testing purposes.  It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon, the sun was still high in the sky, and it was producing energy.  No fuzzy picture this time.  Those few minutes (was it a half hour?) of production, according to our monitoring site, gave the equivalent of  “not driving 16 miles in a standard car.”   Wham!

Nearly complete, with panel #3 before electrical work

*This was "The Chicken Roaster" episode, the 142nd episode of the sitcom Seinfeld, the eighth episode of the eighth season. It aired on November 14, 1996.  You can look it up.